“The fanciest car has just pulled in, Poppy,” her grandmother said in her quavering voice. Her evening game shows were on, but she preferred to watch the comings and goings beyond their front room window. “Is he one of your models needing a head shot? He’s very handsome.”
“What?” Poppy’s stomach dropped. It was completely instinctive and she made herself take a mental step back. There was no reason to believe it would be him.
Even so, she struggled to swallow a jagged lump that lodged in her suddenly arid throat. “Who—?”
The doorbell rang.
Poppy couldn’t move. She didn’t want to see. If it wasn’t Rico, she would be irrationally disappointed. If it was him...
She looked to her daughter, instantly petrified that he was here to claim her. What would he say? How could she stop him? She couldn’t.
It wasn’t him, she told herself. It was one of those prophets in a three-piece suit who hand-delivered pamphlets about the world being on the brink of annihilation.
Her world was fine, she reassured herself, still staring at the sprite who comprised the lion’s share of all that was important to her. Lily tipped her head back in an effort to drain water from an empty cup.
The bell rang again.
“Poppy?” her grandmother prompted, glancing her direction. “Will you answer?”
Mentally, Gran was sharp as a tack. Her vision and hearing never failed her. Osteoporosis, however, had impacted her mobility. Her bones were so fragile, Poppy had to be ever vigilant that Lily and her toys weren’t underfoot. Her gran would break a hip or worse if she ever stumbled.
There were a lot of things about this living arrangement that made it less than ideal, but both she and Gran were maintaining the status quo, kidding themselves that Gramps was only down at the hardware store and would be back any minute.
“Of course.” Poppy snapped out of her stasis and glanced over to be sure the gates on both doorways into the kitchen were closed. All the drawers and cupboards had locks except the one where the plastic dishes were kept. The mixing bowls were a favorite for being dragged out and nested, filled with toys and measuring cups, then dumped without ceremony.
“Keep an eye this way, Gran?” Poppy murmured as she stepped over the gate into the front room, then moved past her seated grandmother to the front door.
Her glance out the side window struck a dark brown bomber jacket over black jeans, but she knew that head, that back with the broad shoulders, that butt and long legs.
His arrival struck like a bus. Like a train that derailed her composure and rattled on for miles, piling one broken thought onto another.
OhGodohGodohGod... Breathe. All the way in, all the way out, she reminded herself. But she had always imagined that if this much money showed up on her doorstep, it would be with an oversize check and a television crew. Not him.
Rico pivoted from surveying her neighbor’s fence and the working grain elevator against the fading Saskatchewan sky. His profile was knife sharp, carved of titanium and godlike. A hint of shadow was coming in on his jaw, just enough to bend his angelic looks into the fallen kind.
He knocked.
“Poppy—?” her grandmother prompted, tone perplexed by the way she was acting. Or failing to.
How? How could he know? Poppy had no doubt that he did. There was absolutely no other reason for this man to be this far off the beaten track. He sure as hell wasn’t here to see her.
Blood searing with fight or flight, heart pounding, she opened the door.
The full force of his impact slammed through her. The hard angle of his chin, the stern cast of his mouth, his wide shoulders and long legs, and hands held in tense, almost fists.
His jaw hardened as he took her in through mirrored aviators. Their chrome finish was cold and steely. If he’d had a fresh haircut, it had been ruffled by the wind. His boots were alligator, his cologne nothing but crisp, snow-scented air and fuming suspicion.
Poppy lifted her chin and pretended her heart wasn’t whirling like a Prairie tornado in her chest.
“Can I help you?” she asked, exactly as she would if he had been a complete stranger.
His hand went to the doorframe. His nostrils twitched as he leaned into the space. “Really?” he asked in a tone of lethal warning.
“Who is it, Poppy?” her grandmother asked.
He stiffened slightly, as though surprised she wasn’t alone. Then his mouth curled with disparagement, waiting to see if she would lie.
Poppy swallowed, her entire body buzzing, but she held his gaze through those inscrutable glasses while she said in a strong voice, “Rico, Gran. The man I told you about. From Spain.”
There, she silently conveyed. What do you think of that?
It wasn’t wise to defy him. She knew that by the roil of threat in the pit of her stomach, but she had had to grow up damned fast in the last two years. She was not some naive traveler succumbing to a charmer who turned out to be a thief, or even the starry-eyed maid who had encouraged a philandering playboy to seduce her.
She was a grown woman who had learned how to face her problems head-on.
“Oh?” Gran’s tone gave the whole game away in one murmur. There was concern beneath her curiosity. Knowledge. It was less a blithe, isn’t that nice that your friend turned up. More an alarmed, Why is he here?
There was no hiding. None. Poppy might not be able to read this man’s eyes, but she read his body language. He wasn’t here to ask questions. He was here to confront.
Because he knew she’d had his baby.
Her eyes grew wet with panic, but through her shock, she reacted to seeing her lover, her first and only lover twenty months after they had conceived their daughter. She had thought her brief hour with him a moment of madness. A rush of sex hormones born of dented self-esteem and grand self-delusion.
Since then, her body had been taken over by their daughter. Poppy had been sure her sex drive had dried up and blown away on the Prairie winds. Or at least was firmly in hibernation.
As it turned out, her libido was alive and well. Heat flooded into her with the distant tingles of intimate, erotic memories. Of the cold press of his belt buckle trapped against her thigh, the dampness of perspiration in the hollow of his spine when she ran her hands beneath his open shirt to clutch at him with encouragement. She recalled exactly the way he had kissed the whisker burn on her chin so tenderly, with a growl of apology in his throat. The way he had cupped her breast with restraint, then licked and sucked at her nipple until she was writhing beneath him.
She could feel anew the sharp sensation of him possessing her, so intimate and satisfying, both glorious and ruinous all at once.
She blushed. Hard. Which made the blistering moment feel like hours. She was overflowing at the edges with mortifying awkwardness, searching her mind
